That strange issue with the internet that took three years to fix
That strange issue with the internet that took three years to fix
I'm going to try my best to tell you what I know about this tough spot I'm in. I would really love if the networking wizard could help me fix this mess, since we've had the same problem for three years now. It's a direct ethernet connection, not WiFi. It goes 1 GB down and 100 upload from Shaw here in Canada. I ran tests on other computers at home using different cables and ports, but got exactly the same results. The modem/router is the exact same device.
The trouble started three years ago out of nowhere between about 2 am central to 11 am. Internet would suddenly spike and lag things like live streams. I complained many times. Eventually some guy on forums said they found a fix, it seemed to work. About three months later, the problem became less specific about time, but my upload would drop down to 49 Kbps or so. Because I'm a live streamer on Twitch TV, having a good connection is really important. So when I was running Streamlabs OBS, I noticed I was dropping 3-5% of my total frames, which is very bad for streaming.
To figure out what was going on, I went to inspector twitch.tv and graphed my upload. It showed exactly what I suspected: the upload kept spiking downwards to 49 Kbps, sometimes 1 Mbps, sometimes 2 Mbps, sometimes 3 Mbps—and you need about 6 Mbps upload to maintain a 1080p stream. I also tested other twitch servers; it was the same thing.
When I contacted Shaw, they did the typical hey, I did a speed test and it looks fine. They hooked up their equipment to my cable modem and said hey it looks fine. In the past, they had sent a total of 10+ techs out, and locally they could never find an issue. About a year later, someone working internally at Shaw almost instantly found a problem in the node. He called me personally and let me know that he found it. The problem was like 90% better than before. He then found some other problems, but it was still doing this weird spiking stuff once in awhile. It was never completely fixed, but I was somewhat satisfied and just accepted it.
Some months later passed, I end up with the exact same problem again. The upload is spiking downwards. Because Shaw didn't believe my Streamlabs OBS or inspector Twitch tests, I decided to watch my Streamlabs OBS live information, and when it would begin lagging, I'd immediately go do a test on testmy.net with a dummy file upload so I could try to rule out whether its a specific server, or if its just like this across the entire internet for me. Well, when I did that and plotted the graph there too, it showed my average upload was 8.8 Mbps, and the graph showed spikes downwards to 1 Mbps (as my other applications were reading).
I showed Shaw all of this. They keep saying it looks fine, no matter what I do. So, my next step was I was going to try to find even more evidence to show a problem exists. So, I downloaded pingplotter and did some tests. It showed at 10.0.0.1 (my local modem) has a constant 50% packet loss. When I do pings to google, theres many hops that have a constant 70-80% packet loss too. I notified Shaw of this, and they said they dont trust 3rd party software for their diagnostics.
One thing I'm questioning is that theres a cable line going directly to my house, which is close to my modem, that looks frayed. The tech was up there just the other day; I'm not sure how he didnt notice that, or maybe its not a big deal and I'm wrong about that. Here are some of the images I have. (When I try to upload it says something went wrong)... https://imgur.com/oOXXyXF View: https://imgur.com/jmQ7Nxf View: https://imgur.com/SOZtis7 View: https://imgur.com/nRIPRUb View: https://imgur.com/rR5pcrG
Before anyone else tries to make an offer on me, Shaw is already standing alone here in my neighborhood.
You have to be careful about how you interpret pingplotter. Really this tool should have a required training test before they let people use it. They just run it and go "red bad must fix". In the first pingplot you show no issues at all. Everything you see is testing error. If for example hop 11 actually discards 100% of the traffic you would never see any hop past it. The same as hop 1 losing 50% of the traffic. If you were really losing 50% your connection would be almost totaly unusable. Even 10% makes it very very bad so these numbers can't be true. The second pingplot is what a bad one looks like. You see .3% packet loss starting in a hop and then continuing all the way to the end including the final destination. Damage caused by an earlier hop will have affect on every hop past it. In the second case it is going to be your router or your PC causing it. What is much more likely it is something stupid with the way IPv6 is implemented. Try to turn off IPv6 support in your PC nic settings and maybe even your router. This could be your whole problem. IPv6 has all kinds of strange issues and when you are running a mix of IPv4 and IPv6 session you can get very inconsistent results. Most times it is people reporting that some web pages run fine and other runs slow. Once you are only running IPv4 you can try the pingplotter tests again but be careful about how you read it. Most times you are better off just using simple constant ping commands. In general you are not going to get anything fixed that is far away from you. You want to test ping to your router ip and to the IP in hop 2. These are the most common points of failure. If there was something wrong with the connection to your house you would see no loss to your router but packet loss to the ISP ip address in hop 2. Get into the modem and check the power level both down and up. The exact values you need to search for it varies a bit depending on the exact docsis encoding being used. Problem with a bad cable tend to show up in these numbers. The ISP likely has checked these already but some ISP techs are idiots.
Those issues you might notice on the ping plotter could actually connect to the other graphs I just sent. I'm going to look into that modem area to figure it out and then explain this back to you right away.
It's hard to tell if they're using IPv6, because even then it might cause this same problem. Your IPv4 pingplotter shows no issues right now, but that doesn't mean there aren't any problems—just that the tool isn't showing them yet. It could be a very slow or intermittent issue that only appeared while I was running that program.
using simple words:
Just to be clear, back when I pushed Shaw really hard about fixing this, they said nothing was wrong for a long time. Even though the person who works on the roads found some problems and fixed them, those big spikes on the graphs went away by 90%. So, way before there were any real issues in the node, is there a way to check if something like that is happening? I mean, could we find noise inside the node? When I send these files anywhere on the internet, they all show those same spike patterns, going down to about 1 Mbps or less.
I walked into my XB7 router and didn't know how to turn off that ipv6 thing. There was no switch for it. I feel totally stuck, kind of hopeless. Back when I had this issue before, the problem ended up in the router itself. Shaw said there are no problems though, but last time they said everything is fine for six months and only found the bug then. Can you help me figure out if it's just on my node or not? Is there a test we can run? It really bothers me that I can't do live streaming like this anymore because of that upload speed issue.